Stupid Kids
Stage Left Theatre
Stupid Kids, the latest effort by the ever adventurous Roadworks Productions, dramatizes teen identity crises by focusing on four contemporary 17-year-old outcasts trapped in the suburban sterility of one Joseph McCarthy High School. Struggling to create authentic personalities, they find themselves turning into mere reflections of earlier generations’ rebellious role models–specifically, 50s icons James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo in the film Rebel Without a Cause. Playwright John C. Russell, who died of AIDS complications in 1994 at the age of 31, took this 1955 film as his primary inspiration, perhaps because its once shocking depiction of gun-wielding middle-class “juvenile delinquents” seemed simultaneously innocent and prescient.
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The Secret of the Old Queen also explores issues of identity by reexamining 50s teen icons from a queer perspective. But Timothy Cope and Paul Boesing’s campy musical makes its points through parody rather than appropriation, taking as its heroes the crime-busting Hardy Boys, both spoofing their cornball image and mining it for subversive sexual humor.
